Many people who loudly pride themselves for tolerance, kindness, and openness toward difference drop those principles the moment someone expresses a preference or view they dislike. Disagreement itself is fine. What is not fine is the usual responses that follows: comments whose main purpose is to insult, shame, and make the other person feel small, delivered in front of an audience that can be counted on to approve.
It’s status performance. The goal is not to show why the opinion is wrong or change minds; it is to hurt the speaker and fish for applause. Feeling morally justified does not change the nature of the act; when the sole intention is to hurt they’re being evil and a bully.
The people who upvote or otherwise reward those insults are part of the same behavior. Standing by and cheering while someone is targeted is participation. It supplies the social payoff that makes the cruelty worthwhile.
This is one of the reasons large parts of the internet feel needlessly hostile. When perceived moral superiority is used as cover for meanness, and when an audience reliably encourages it, the result is environments where many people simply stop speaking. The claimed values of kindness and tolerance are revealed, in those moments, as conditional.
And no, this isn’t about being tolerant towards people with extreme views. The idea for this post was sparked by my previous post about AI music and the vicious personal attacks I received for admitting to enjoying some of it.
Catharsis.
Nothing feels better than insulting evil. Supporting AI over people, valuing money over people, showing loyalty to a country more than Humanity, all that is evil. It’s getting so many innocent people killed, innocent people you never hear anything about, because they are poor. They just become a number you never pay attention to.
The suicide rate of the United States is currently 15.6. About 15 people commit suicide per every 100,000 people in the USA. All because they have to constantly witness injustice, racism, discrimination, xenophobia, greed, and assholes who want to replace them, their work and their art, the only purposes in life they have, their only way of expressing themselves, with AI and robots.
That was in 2021. It’s probably much higher now, with Trump leaving so many people in poverty. Scamming them with crypto, the Epstein files, people like OP who doesn’t mind replacing human artists with AI… All that easily depressed so many people to the point of suicide. It’s just very easy for the government and media to cover all that up. They just don’t talk about it, that’s it.
The fact that you are not angry enough yet, not insulting the people building that environment that is causing so many suicides, is pretty gross. I don’t ever want to be like that. That’s what my family became, and they are insufferable and evil. They don’t care about poor people dying, being paid the minimum wage, ending in crime, losing their children, even supporting Trump (and we are Mexicans living in Mexico) because he promised them money with crypto. Fuck that.
What good comes out of the time you tolerate or ignore all that evil? It keeps growing, unchecked.
instead of alchemizing insults i work to bring that attention. you can be aware and care without yelling to the choir and scaring the curious away